If you think about it, there is only a handful of sitcoms on television that you could really call great. You know the sort you can watch again and again and never get tired of the jokes you have heard so many times. I guess if I was asked to nominate my top ten, it would go something like this, in no particular order. Fawlty Towers, One Foot on the Grave, The Office, I'm Alan Partridge, The Good Life, Arrested Development, Black Books, Married with Children, Black Adder and Keeping Up Appearances. And I haven't even mentioned such television monuments as Only Fools and Horses, Porridge, Friends, Dad's Army, Cheers, Steptoe and Son, Till death us do Part, The likely Lads, Reggie Perrin and Phoenix Nights. Wow, that's another ten. Maybe I was a bit hasty in my initial verdict. And I reckon if you were to sit down and compose your top ten, many of the ones I have mentioned might feature but I'm pretty sure there'd be a few others that I've forgotten altogether. And then there are those classic moments that you never forget in a certain programme. Moments like Basil Fawlty's Jackboot walk, his bashing of the car with a tree and asking a lady guest if she expected to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon through her hotel window in Torquay. Things like the Little Book of Calm in Black Books, the henpecked husbands of Hyacinth, Marge and Sybil, the dysfunctional Bluth, Bundy, Garnett and Simpson families and the hopeless cases that were David Brent, Alan Partridge, Del Boy and Victor Meldrew.
But the King of all sitcoms for me will always be Father Ted. The first time I viewed it, I couldn't believe the golden nugget I had discovered quite by accident one night on Channel Four. And its brilliance was brought home to me the other night with stark reality in the episode Speed 3.
The story is about an over amorous milkman called Pat Mustard who loses his job due to Father Ted's interference and then subsequently plants a bomb under the milk float that Father Dougal is driving. In a parody of Speed the movie, Dougal is forced to keep the milk float above the devastating speed of four miles per hour or the bomb will be activated and explode. Meanwhile Father Ted and his cronies, in attempting to solve the problem, draw alongside on a trailer towed by a dump truck and say Mass for the unfortunate Dougal and after watching the Poseidon adventure all the way through for clues, because a famous actor played the part of a priest in the movie, can only come up with the plan to say another Mass. Meanwhile, Dougal, continuing to hold a steady speed of just above four miles per hour, meets a crisis in the form of an obstruction up ahead on the road. This consists of ten large, identical cardboard boxes piled in pyramid shape. Two things make this scene outrageously funny. First, it never occurs to either Dougal or Ted to steer the milk float to the other side of the road and just drive past the obstruction. And secondly, when Ted races ahead to dismantle the boxes, he insists on rebuilding them, one by one, back into the pyramid shape on the other side of the road, just rescuing the last one before the milk float arrives. Then in true Starsky and Hutch style, he roars through the assembled boxes, scattering them everywhere. And that's the beauty of the show, making the simplest of tasks into something almost impossible.
Of course what makes it all the more funny is that many of us take the hard way to overcome obstructions when the answer is staring at us in the face. Not like David, who saw the only way to meet the obstruction called Goliath was to meet him head on. Not like Moses who soon realised that only the Plagues God would send could change Pharaoh's heart. But maybe like the Israelites who could have been in the land 'flowing with milk and honey' in a very short time but took forty years because they couldn't deal with the obstructions they kept creating. And as I watch our province forge ahead towards a lasting peace after over thirty years of violence, I think of how so many lost their lives because of the obstructions of pride, hatred and vengeance that filled so many heads for so long. And I think of God who realised that the biggest obstruction to man being reconciled to Him was our sin and provided His Son to remove that barrier once and for all, through His death on the cross. And yet too many of us want to try and remove that obstruction ourselves, through living upright lives, paying money to the church, singing in the choir, serving on a church body or in some other self thought way. And then someday we realise that all we have done is move the obstruction a bit further down the road but haven't got rid of it at all. Only Jesus removes it completely and He then will lead us on towards His Father. After all, He said, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.' Whatever is obstructing your path to the Father today, ask Jesus to take it away and enjoy the freedom of a clear path ahead.
